You can't save enough energy to compensate. Population in the 1960's, 3 billion. Population in 2000, 6 billion. Population now, 7 billion. Assuming we all cut our energy usage by half, which is outright insane, give it another 30 years and we're right back here. Except quality of life is much worse, because we're all using half the energy. That's if you don't count the effect of developing nations using more energy as they join the first world. You don't even need to rely on the population growth.

The real question is why do you oppose nuclear energy? Even if it's not wind turbine clean, it's cleaner than most energy used now, so it's a step in the right direction.

Here's the real plausible and sustainable plan of lowering total energy usage. Ignore individual energy usage. Individually, we should be double, tripling, quadrupling energy usage. After all, the goal for any individual is to live the most comfortable and fulfilling life he can. So, what do you do if you want to save the Earth? Just have less kids. You don't even need to have zero kids. Have 1. You're contributing to negative population growth which makes you not only carbon neutral but actually better than neutral, and once everyone starts doing so (and they will as global standards of living rises, as it's something that happens naturally to educated individuals with a high standard of living), population will go down, and total energy usage will drop even as individual energy usage skyrockets. Everyone's happy. In the meantime, we move to cleaner energy to support the population we have now.

It's ok. We watch rants from anti-gun people all the time and are utterly amazed they believe that making guns illegal will somehow solve the human problem of people who are just fucking nuts. As if it were completely impossible to go on a killing spree with any other easily accessible tools, such as a car. How many pedestrians do you think someone could take out before they were stopped?

I don't own a gun. I don't really have a desire to own a gun. However, when I see a news story about someone just opening fire on other people for no reason I don't think, "if only gun ownership were illegal, this guy clearly wouldn't have been able to acquire one illegally, or start randomly stabbing people in the throat in a crowded location, or veer his vehicle off the road at 50 mph into a group of unsuspecting pedestrians, or built home-made explosives." I think, "holy shit, what the hell would make someone WANT to hurt other innocent people out of the blue?" Because that's the real problem. Can you picture yourself randomly killing a bunch of people? I sure can't put myself in that scenario, and it's not because I don't know where to get a gun.

But hey, I must just be a barking lunatic because I just don't think most people want to hurt anyone else, whether they have the means to or not, and therefore don't think it's right for us to infringe on the freedoms of all those good people. Sorry about not being as enlightened as you are.

Voltage is not power. 240 V at what amperage?

I will certainly agree with that, no arguments from me.

So what you're saying is that it's perfectly fine?

Taking your eyes off the road in front of you is not only ok, it's required for safe driving. You have to check mirrors, you have to turn your head to check your blind spot when changing lanes. All while moving forward. Listening to GPS instructions and glancing above and to the right to confirm a map at periodic interviews isn't dangerous at all. If you're watching youtube videos on it, that's a different story.

Never attribute to a conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by a lying politician.

During Obama's campaign, I was happy to see him campaigning against the violations of our civil rights that the patriot act represented. Then he voted to give retroactive telecom immunity to the warrantless wiretapping debacle. I then realized he was just saying what he needed to say to get the anti-Bush votes, but if he won, it would be more of the same.

Also note his statement regarding supporting the bill: "It says that Obama will try to get the immunity provision removed, but failing that will vote for the overhauled wiretapping bill anyway." It's exactly like how he signed the NDAA, which allows for the military to indefinitely detain American citizens in the United States without charging them with a crime. He signed it "with reservations", but signed it anyway. He seems to like to enable unacceptable government policy while simultaneously disagreeing with it. He's pretty much just getting what he wants without completely losing the liberal base by claiming he doesn't really want it.

It's not really a democrat vs. republican issue. It's a politician issue. Unless the public starts paying attention to this crap and stops voting in people whose rhetoric does not match their voting record, and starts voting out people who have a record of voting for legislation which violates our civil rights, there's no solving it. People just vote for red vs blue, and it's going to eventually deteriorate to how the Drazi from Babylon 5 behave regarding green vs. purple. It's a system that rewards politicians for saying which color they associate themselves with, but what they actually do doesn't matter.

I agree completely. I started watching it, planning on just seeing the beginning of the episode to get a feel for it, but I couldn't stop until the end.

As you said, some of the actors are a bit off in their mannerisms, but the writing so perfectly caught the feel of TOS that it didn't matter. Everyone had a moment or two in which they channeled the original actors, simply as a result of their lines capturing the very essence of the show. The production is top-notch. The set looks exactly like the original Enterprise, the music you expect to hear pops up at exactly the right moments, and the trademark TOS close-ups happen when you expect them to. I thought it was a nice touch they continued a story from the original show, with the same guest actor even.

The only thing I wish they hadn't done were the TNG references. Don't get me wrong, I love TNG, but a holodeck and ship's counselor on the 1701 don't make any sense considering we don't see either in the TOS movies. It's just too early. In fact, TNG made a point to have Starfleet personnel be impressed with the holodeck technology on the Galaxy class, so I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be fairly new then.

You say that as if it's a virtue. People willing to change their stance when presented with evidence their stance is incorrect are to be valued, not shunned. Willingness to concede a point in a debate is virtuous. The alternative, sticking to your guns no matter what, is a character flaw.

Think they can get away with it is right, but I personally don't think they can. The next election will tell, but I expect Democrats to take a ton of seats, for better or for worse, depending on your political beliefs.

I've never *had* to do such a thing, but I've attempted to do it for fun while playing with Orbiter (and messed it up somewhere along the line, because it didn't really get me to the orbit I wanted). I'm aware of the amount of work involved at least. The benefit of a movie is that you don't have to show them working through the calculation for half an hour. The tension would be in finding ways to get the accurate information they needed, and then you could time-warp the calculation away.

Part of the gimmick (and it was a gimmick) of Gravity, is that the entire movie takes place in zero-G. If they had other characters in it, such as mission control on Earth trying to figure out how to regain communications, or people in the ISS or Chinese station before they bailed, they could easily cut to those other characters while the main ones perform the computation.

The "cool kids" are overrated. The drama of having to calculate orbital mechanics by yourself without NASA would be far more interesting than watching the astronaut who crashed the Soyuz landing in the simulator multiple times struggle to remember which button to press to disconnect from the space station, but be inexplicably fantastic at manually firing thrusters just right to avoid colliding to said station while tethered to it by a tangled parachute all the while going through rapid rotations induced by collision with a debris field. Then we get to watch the actual landing procedure that she consistently failed in the simulation be performed entirely automated by the computers of a Chinese capsule that supposedly uses the exact same procedure as the Soyuz. Which apparently involves pressing all of 1 button, and works even if you mistakenly press a few wrong ones by mistake first. It'll just beep at you if you do that. This completely automated, flawless landing will happen even though the capsules computers are shown bugging up and catching on fire during re-entry.

I think it's pretty sad that what passes for "scientific accuracy" is that there was no sound in space, while completely ignoring the more important things like the ability to see the ISS from Hubble and to match orbits with it relatively quickly via the thrusters of the MMU. Then when you bring into question the scientific plausibility of the debris field that is responsible for the disaster in the movie, you're said to be "nitpicking" said "scientifically accurate" movie.

I had more fun watching Armageddon. At least it didn't pretend to be anything other than action movie in space, which is all Gravity really was.

It's not a problem of suspension of disbelief, it's a problem with lazy writing. As a writer, you may define your world however you want to, and I'll accept it, but you cannot violate your rules. You want to write about an alien who can fly when he's in a planet orbiting a yellow sun? If those are your rules, that's fine, I'll accept them. I know nothing about this alien species of yours other than what you've told me, I'm willing to accept their biological structure makes use of some physics that's unknown to us. However, when this alien saves a human who fell from the top of a skyscraper by catching them 2 meters off the ground, you didn't explain how that's any better than hitting ground. You want to write about humans who are trapped in a virtual world by sentient AIs and don't know it, and how liberated humans are able to enter this world and hack it just enough to perform feats which seem impossible? That's alright, that's your setting. However, when one of those humans starts performing those impossible feats in the real world, you failed to explain how that would work.

In a way, the more detached you are from reality, the more difficult it is to screw up. If you're writing about a world of hobbits, orcs, elves, dragons, and dwarves, there's very little you can possibly do that's going to make me question it. Everything you do in that setting I take as simply additional information that I didn't know about that world. The only way you can screw that up is by contradicting whatever you've established before. If you tell me all dwarves are all short, and then introduce a dwarf character that happens to be taller than an elf, you better have an explanation. In the very same way that you should have an explanation for why a woman floating in zero-g doesn't have free-floating hair.

For that particular dissection, I was in a school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. That said, it was an American school, so I figured the curriculum wouldn't deviate that much from the norm here. And I wasn't wrong, read on.

The "norm" just happens to deviate a great deal between different schools in different parts of the country. A quick search brought me a curriculum resource for middle school teachers with a page on dissection. The relevant quote you should be looking for is, "It is recommended that you get a preserved frog. If you use a living frog, you will have to put it in a bottle or jar and drop a cotton ball of chloroform to put it into deep sleep." That was the procedure followed at my school, and the page seems to confirm that it does happen in the US, it wasn't particular to my school. You're just thinking, "that's not how I did it, so no other school could have possibly done it differently."

That said, most of the results from my web search were pages talking about how evil and unnecessary dissection is, how we need to move to more humane education, a bunch of PETA and "anti-vivisection society" pages...well, I'm guessing the dissection of frogs, especially live ones, have become a rare occurrence now. So here I am trying to use it as an example of why we shouldn't be fighting the cockroach rights battle, but the battle has actually been going on with the very examples I'm trying to use to explain why it's alright. And I'm on the losing side, with a lot of school opting for "virtual" dissection on ipads.

Hey, look! Pictures of a frog dissection in a US elementary school in third grade! So they still do that, at least. Did you even bother doing a search before deciding to call me a liar? Or did you, once again, decide that whatever education experience you had when growing up was the exact same everyone else had?

We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I'm pretty sure we're not going to find common ground if we disagree on the educational value of the kit.

Uh...the frog is alive when you dissect it, not dead. And you're cutting it up. You get to see its heart beating, the lungs moving. I don't see how it's different at all.

When I did it in school, it was third grade and I was 9.

My point is that it's not the action that is bad or good, but the motivation. If you cut the limb of the cockroach just to watch it suffer and hop around without a limb, that's very bad. That's the action to which there's all that correlation with later violent crimes that you're talking about. If you perform surgery on an anesthetized cockroach in order to learn about it, that's not bad. Because you're trying to minimize the suffering, and you're doing something to learn about it. And it absolutely is necessary to perform the action in order to learn it, the same way the a kid will learn a lot more doing the dissection of the frog himself than watching a video of it.

I'm honestly not disagreeing with you on the problem of dissensitization. I agree with you completely that there's a correlation between kids who enjoy inflicting pain in animals and sociopathic behavior. It's just that, in my opinion, it's not the action that causes the dissensitization, it's the motivation behind it. My mother grew up in a farm and watched as her mother snapped the necks of chickens as a 5 year-old. She was forced to do it herself when she got older. It's a gruesome action, but this didn't dissensitize her. In fact, she turned vegetarian for ethical reasons, because she saw too many animals she bonded with being killed for food. The reason the action itself didn't teach her to lose empathy is because they weren't killing to cause suffering, they were going after a quick death with minimized suffering for the purpose of eating it. It didn't encourage the enjoyment of pain in the animals, it discouraged it by enforcing correct procedure. The fact that the kit includes a procedure that minimizes the pain of the cockroach by numbing it eliminates that problem.